Long outage -- no communication -- no ETA -- no updates

Someone from bodHOST please check on ticket VOQ-172-78545 for me and let me know what's going on. The server has not been working properly since yesterday evening, and has been down altogether for maybe six hours.

My last update from bodHOST was at 6:24 a.m., and I still don't know exactly what the problem is or what the ETA is. My boss is seething, and I have no information to give him.

I do understand that techs need to spending their time fixing problems, not talking about them. But no updates since 6:24 this morning is unacceptable. That's more than nine hours ago.

Well, the server is back up. Kudos to Michael and Sam for getting in touch with me shortly after I posted this.

But here's the thing: I've been farting around with computers since the 1970's, and I know that when geeks are fixing something, you want them fixing -- not talking. I've been in that position, and constant calls from clients wanting to know what's going on are a frustration.

There is, however, a solution to that: Keep the clients informed proactively. Post something on Twitter once or twice an hour; or for Pete's sake (who's Pete, anyway?) use this forum. That's what it's here for! Keep clients informed proactively, and we won't be calling you over and over again.

Also, have someone read the ticket replies, for crying out loud. It seems to me (although I'm not 100 percent sure) that the node was actually up and running well before my VM was. I could ping the IP long before the server came back up. My VM had a problem accessing storage when it was restarting, and it needed a FSCK. So it may (or may not) be that had someone actually read my tickets during the day, we could have salvaged half a day of business, at least.

What I'm saying is that the cluster or node might be up and running, but some clients' VMs still having problems; and the guys in the trenches might not even know this because no one's reading the tickets.

There was a time when Shane hung around here on the forums, and if a ticket was not being handled or responded to promptly, all you had to do was post the ticket number, and Shane would make sure the right thing happened. That kind of thing saves clients.

In my case, although this account is in my name (as is everything else Web-related for the company), I'm not actually the boss. I'm on a contract to manage the server for another company, and that company's boss is my boss. And my boss seriously wants to cancel bodHOST and move elsewhere because of this.

I don't want to do that because, all in all, bod has done a fantastic job keeping our sites up over the years, and I'm a loyal sort of guy. The problem is that the boss was on my ass about this repeatedly today, and rightly so, and I had nothing to tell him because bodHOST didn't give me anything to tell him!

I mean, even if the boss didn't understand a blessed word I was saying when I told him the problems and what was being done to fox them, knowing that I was in communication with the guys in the trenches would have been comforting to him.

Instead, the boss was asking me how long it would take to get up and running, and whether I thought bodHOST was doing all they could to fix the problem. Because here's the thing: I'm a geek, and I know that bodHOST's geeks were doing everything they possibly could to fix the problem. That's what they do. That's their reason for being here. But when the boss asks me, "What is the problem that they are trying to fix?" and I have no answer for him -- because bodHOST didn't give me one -- how am I supposed to make him believe that bodHOST really is working hard to get the services back up? I don't even know exactly what the problem is!!

In summary, I am grateful for the great work the crew did getting my VM up and running, and I'm sure they did everything they could to minimize the downtime. But I'm annoyed that I wasn't kept in the loop. I don't expect phone calls every ten minutes, but damn, would it be so hard to post progress reports on the forum or on Twitter? Or even email canned progress reports to everyone who filed a ticket, if you don't want it in public where potential customers might see it?

We appreciate your patience. bodHOST’s team has already decided to post the updates on time on our network status portal ( http://bod-status.com/ ), and forum. I request you to follow us on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome. Please let me know if you have any further questions.